King Carol, Hitler and Lupescu
BUT THE SIXTIES and seventies made him cry. He couldn’t stand the sense of loss. How had they all been persuaded to hand their keys back to their jailors?
Was freedom really so frightening?
Evidently a lot of Romanians thought so.
BORN IN GEORGIA
President Ion Iliescu pledged yesterday to keep Romania on the road to democracy and to end what he called the country’s moral decay.
Reuter/Majorca Daily Bulletin, 21 June 1990
“DON’T TELL ME!” Jerry smiled at the air-stewardess as she laid her towel at the edge of the pool. He leaned his arms beside it and tried to drag his pale body higher from the water of Tooting Bee Baths. “You’re psychic too!” Her answering sneer would have sunk the Bismarck. “I knew it!” Jerry was in a fairly insensitive mood that afternoon. “I like your taste in boob-tubes,” got him reported to the life-guard and, “Come fly with me,” thrown out of the pool area.
As he slouched off across Tooting Common, whistling to his horrible dog, he wondered if his grandma was home from work and maybe good for half-a-crown, or at least a bag of toffees (she did half-time at Rowntree’s).
He jumped further backward until he was comfortably unaware of his free movement through Time and was able to turn his attention from the stewardess, still baffled by his sixties’ slang, to the toy-soldier shop back near St Leonard’s Church in Streatham Hill, a few minutes walk up the main road and down towards the Common. He wanted to make sure his naval gun-team was still there. He’d given the man 9d a week for it and he was only another l/6d away; but he couldn’t be sure of anything any more. Was he creator or the created? This unlikely thought made him pop in to the quiet of the church and glare with some respect at the stained glass prophets whom he now completely confused with God. For him, God had become a plurality of saints and angels. He’d had Rudolf Steiner to thank for that. Jerry - or someone like him - grinned into the dusty shadows of the Anglican sacristy. There was nothing left to steal.
Jerry tipped his hat to the new generation and turned back to his toys.
Two more weeks and he could land a team on Forbidden Island. His sailors almost within his grasp and the summer sun melting the sweet tar of Streatham, he sauntered down towards Norbury and Jennings’ second hand book shop where he planned to trade his wholesome volume of The Captain for a novel called Monsieur Zenith by Anthony Skene, his current literary favourite and inventor of Zenith the Albino, the smoothest crook that ever smoked an opium cigarette. It was Jerry’s ambition to smoke an opium cigarette as soon as possible. His elders by a year had already ventured Up Town to Soho and found it good.
Meanwhile, let some other Jerry carry West London for a while. He was settling down in the South. Here only Teddy Boys lay in wait for you with razors. Anything was better than Blenheim Crescent’s mephitic presence…
But thought is resurrection. He found himself struggling to force his mother back into non-existence. Mrs Cornelius was unperturbed. She, of all people, was bound to survive. There wasn’t a holocaust made that could get her. “Why don’cher come ‘ome, Jer?”
He gave up. With pouting reluctance he wheeled his big, heavy bike up the hill and down towards Elgin Crescent. He was back in Notting Dale, immediately post-Colin Wilson. His bid for some other, less melancholy, past had failed again. Somewhere, he heard his Shade saying, I was happy once.
These weren’t the kind of losses he had expected.
MIDNIGHT DRIVE
As usual in the Nazi propaganda of subversion, Goebbels did not scruple about consistency in his scurrilities with regard to Madame Lupescu, the king’s companion of twenty years.
Some of his ‘stories’ represented her as the instrument of ‘capitalist profit-mongers, concessionaires and exploiters’, others contained plausible tales to show she was the agent of ‘international Bolshevism’. Contradiction of this kind never worried the Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment. Hitler had laid down, in Mein Kampf, his fundamental principle of good political tactics and propaganda - the bigger the lie, the more easy its acceptance, the more effective its result.
King Carol, Hitler and Lupescu
“EAT YER TEA, Jer. I’ll be back in abart an ‘ar.” Mrs Cornelius settled her hat and contemplated benevolently the slices of bread and Marmite, the Mars bar she had laid out for her son. “There’s some Tizer in ther cupboard.”
With the air of a mother who had more than fulfilled her duty, she left for the Blenheim Arms.
Jerry took pleasure in his food. It was one of his favourite meals. The area door opened and he saw Old Sammy put his hesitant head into the room. “Wotcher, young ‘un. Ma in?”
“Pub,” said Jerry. “Can I come and watch your telly later, Sam?”
“Course you can, lad.” Old Sammy was grateful for anyone willing, for whatever reasons, to accept his affection.
I BEG YOUR PARDON
Speaking after his inauguration in Bucharest’s Atheneum concert hall, Iliescu was unapologetic about his government’s role in dealing with street protests last week, although he admitted there had been excesses.
Reuter/Majorca Daily Bulletin, 21 June 1990
THE MANNERS OF these people, with their casual discourt-esies and easy racialism, soon made Jerry as uncomfortable with the 50s as he had been with the 80s. What had changed? He was getting fazed again, almost as bad as he had become by the early 60s. “Arse that way, elbow that,” he told himself ritualistically as he made his cautious progress - some lemming to its cliff - back to his Royal Albert.
He was experiencing a certain amount of deterioration. As he pedalled, the mist grew warm and began to stink, reminding him of the wartime factories of Newcastle, of heavy locomotives panting in the steely evening light; the only colour the vivid flames of furnaces and mills. He had no idea where he was.
“Time travel had for too long been a matter of instinct, its secrets the province of romantic bohemians and crazed ex-perimenters.” Bishop Beesley spoke from somewhere at the centre of his steam-driven orrery, from some unlearned future. “It’s high time we brought System and Intellect to the Question of Time.” He pronounced some reasonable imitation of what he guessed was the current mode. Or was it post-mode now?
Jerry was beginning to sense his bearings. Somewhere from the late 80s he heard a howl of terrible xenophobia as a thousand intellectuals turned their hatred on the Unavoidable Present and many thousands of Muslims expressed their anger with two hundred years of insult which they had previously pretended to themselves was only the province of the ignorant and ill-educated amongst their neighbours.
I’D RATHER GO BLIND
Next day it was announced that the government had decided to form a new ‘Party of National Regeneration’, a fusion of all political parties into one ‘National Renaissance Front’. There was no specific abolition of the former political factions, but by clear and unmistakable inference, they ceased to exist.
Henceforth, Roumania was to be a One Party State whose principal members were to be nominated and whose purpose was to be ‘the Defence of the Fatherland’. The leader of the new Single Party was King Carol. Elections would be held, it was stated, but only candidates approved by the Single Party leaders and declaring allegiance to it, would be permitted to seek the votes of the electors…